Rhythm platformer Sound Shapes is shaping up for its Vita debut

The creator of Everyday Shooter is nearly done with his next PlayStation game.

Jonathan Mak (left) and Shaw-Han Liem (right) in the office of Capybara Games, where some of Sound Shapes' part-time developers work.

Matthew Braga

Jonathan Mak sighs.

After three years of work, development on Sound Shapes is finally wrapping up. And yet, Mak and co-creator Shaw-Han Liem don't seem particularly relieved.

"At this point, all you're seeing are problems," says Liem. "It's hard to appreciate how cool it is sometimes, because all you're dealing with all day are issues."

From an outsider's perspective, however, you might say Sound Shapes is shaping up to become one of the PlayStation Vita's killer apps. The game is similar to Mak's previous title, Everyday Shooter, in that it's musically driven and visually striking experience. But Sound Shapes extends these concepts into the realm of platform games, letting players move a sticky, blob-like creature through elaborate 2D worlds while capturing strategically placed notes that chain and build upon one another to create a looping song. Enemies and projectiles pulse to the rhythm, and the game world is almost entirely tied to musical cues. In some scenarios, you can even gauge when your blob is in danger because of the beat.

It's an experience that is hard to explain in words, but in playing the game it's clear that Sound Shapes combines the best parts of the rhythm and platform genres into a wholly new and incredibly fun experience. Talking to the game's creators, though, it's also clear that balancing the two genres has proven difficult.

"The campaign has examples of... levels that are [about] enjoying the musical experience while you're traveling through the world. And then it has some pretty hardcore platforming insanity," says Liem, who is also known as Toronto-based electronic music artist I am Robot and Proud.

Sound Shapes in action at GDC 2012.

The challenge is keeping that platforming insanity in check. Even this far into development, there is a sense that the pair is being pulled in both directions—and with additional pressure, not only to finish the game but to make something that fans will enjoy. "Making it too gamey is a touchy subject, I guess, because it sort of fights against the spirit of the game," Mak elaborates, "which is all about creating stuff and enjoying music."

The creation aspect that Mak refers to is another major pillar of the Sound Shapes' experience—user generated content. A level editor included in-game will allow players to write their own songs and design their own levels to share with the community, a process that is surprisingly accessible to non-musicians. The interface resembles that of a synthesizer, where different instruments and notes can be placed on-screen. The relative positioning determines the timing and sound of the looping beats, and you can see and hear the results in real time.

The hard part is, of course, making it simple for players to create good-sounding levels—songs and records that "reasonably sound like music," says Mak. Thus, the tool has been purposely designed in such a way that it's easy for someone who has no knowledge or rhythm or tone or melody to pick up the game and create a level, while "musical housekeeping" is constantly taking place behind the scenes. But the creators say depth is also there for players to create something truly amazing and unique.

"The approach is to come up with ways of encoding musical knowledge into the game itself—coding ideas about rhythm and ideas of melody and harmony and different musical concepts into the visuals and into the entities' behaviors themselves—so that just by manipulating the things visually, you can be manipulating these musical concepts without having to necessarily know what those things mean," explains Liem. It's like watching a musical score play in real time—visualized, not with traditional instruments, but elements of the game world.

"It's super exciting. Even just as someone who wants to write music, I would want to fuck around in it," says Mak. "It's not Cubase or Logic, but its own thing."

The pair have a similar philosophy when it comes to level design—creating the visuals and gameplay elements shouldn't be difficult either. Mak, for example, had never developed a platform game before, and as a result had to rethink a lot of the traditional wisdom of how platform games are built, without breaking the rhythmic and musical elements of the game. That also means Mak and Liem have been able to use their own learning experience to make the creation process easier for players. The game is constantly teaching players how new tools and enemies work in each song, so that by the time they reach the end of the campaign, they've seen enough of how everything works to re-create that functionality themselves.

"You can make a game that's mostly music. You can make a level that's all super, super hardcore gameplay stuff. And we think it's cool that you can go to those two extremes," Liem elaborates. "But we're sort of waiting to see what things people are doing and how people are using it. And I feel like that's going to be a whole thing beyond us just finishing the game—us participating in this community."

"Maybe there'll be this whole sub-genre of Sound Shapes levels that are just beats," suggests Mak. "And it's really easy to collect all the notes, and you just hear cool music. We would want to respond to that."

That balance between music and gameplay is perhaps Mak and Liem's biggest challenge. They're quick to point out that features like leaderboards and the timed completion of levels aren't meant to deter more casual players. For instance, the game doesn't penalize a player if he or she takes too long to complete a level, or doesn't collect all the notes along the way—they can still experience the visuals and music of the game at their own pace.

The fear of being "too gamey," or not enough, is a constant concern. "So even though we're almost done, it's kind of like we're not almost done," says Mak, who declined to give a target release date. "If this thing takes off, and people are interested in it, there's so much more to explore."

"I think we have an idea in our head of how good it could be," says Liem. "So at this point, it would be pretty shitty to have it not live up to that—to have been working on it for this long, you know?"